Opinion

Lagos – Some lecturers of the Lagos State University (LASU) have expressed divergent views on the dismissal of its 15 academic staff, including the chairman of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and his deputy.

LASU

The LASU lecturers made their views known in separate interviews in Lagos on Tuesday.

LASU Governing Council had on Sept. 8 dismissed 15 academic staff along with two non-academic staff and demoted two others.

Among those dismissed for various acts of misconduct were ASUU-LASU Chairman, Dr Isaac Oyewunmi, and his Deputy, Dr Adebowale Adeyemi-Suenu.

The university found Oyewunmi guilty of demanding N50,000 from 2003 modular year students of Political Science Education on the sandwich programme to process their results.

Adeyemi-Suenu was said to have unilaterally altered the results of 12 students already advised to withdraw by the university senate in the 2015/2016 academic session.

Others were said to have defaulted on conditions of their training leave bond and also abandoned their duty.Dr Patrick Adegbuyi of the Mechanical Engineering Department said Oyewunmi and Adeyemi-Suenu had lost legitimacy as ASUU-LASU executive following their dismissal by the university and called for the immediate dissolution of the branch executive.

“The present ASUU-LASU executive should be dissolved and a caretaker committee put in place to run the affairs of the union pending election of the substantive [...]

Opinion: We do not want a repeat of the Civil War – YNaija

By Gideon Arinze

Several decades after the war that lasted between 1967-1970, there were stories of how the Federal government then in Lagos, launched a full-scale invasion into Biafra, surrounding her with aerial bombardments that led to the death of over 3 million people. From stories of how children died as a result of the outbreak of disease epidemics to stories of how women, with their suckling babies strapped to their backs, travelled far distances to seek asylum and those of how men turned carnivores, feeding on their fellow men as a result of widespread hunger and starvation. There was the story of the naval blockade, how the Nigerian government starved the Biafran people into submission, with an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people dying every day.

Fought barely seven years after the country gained independence from Britain, the war was triggered by the massacre of Igbos living in the northern part of the country. After the first and second coup, tension began to rise in the north and the embers of ethnic discrimination against the Igbos heightened. While the Federal military government felt it was unnecessary for the Eastern Region to break away, the Biafrans on the other side of the divide felt they could no longer relate smoothly with the Northan- dominated Federal government and saw secession as the only way to survive and avoid extinction.

UN bodies, Nigeria and arms proliferation – Guardian (blog)

It is worrisome that despite age-long unilateral and multilateral actions against arms proliferations especially around global flashpoints and vulnerable regions in Africa and the Middle East, the menace is still a bugbear to citizens and governments including Nigeria’s.

Which was why despite the efforts of cross-border security agencies like the Police, Customs Service and Immigration Services, borders of African countries recent reports still implicated porous borders all over, allowing illicit arms trafficking, which has resulted in the proliferation of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW).

What is SALW? ECOWAS Convention on Small Arms and Light Weapons, their Ammunition and other Related Materials of 2006, defines small arms as arms destined for personal use and which include: firearms and other destructive arms or devices such as an exploding bomb, an incendiary bomb or a gas bomb, a grenade, a rocket launcher, a missile, a missile system or a mine. Revolvers and pistols with automatic loading, rifles and carbines, machine guns, assault rifles, light machine guns are also examples of SALW.

Although arms proliferation is a global issue, available data on SALW show that out of the 640 million circulating globally, it is estimated that 100 million are found in Africa, about 30 million in sub-Saharan Africa and 8 million in West Africa, alone. The majority of these SALW about 59 per cent are in the hands of civilians, 38 per cent are [...]